Greetings fellow and former gimps! I joined your world a few weeks ago, but first a little background.
I’m a 44 year old male (Pam is not my name, pamf is an acronym for punk a** mo-fo, something me and a group of friends call each other) that has played ultimate for over 25 years. If you don’t know, ultimate is a Frisbee sport, and no it doesn’t involve dogs, tricks or throwing the disc into a basket. I played competitively, traveling to many tournaments each year for quite a while, until my daughter was too old for me to justify putting her through the rigors of the travel. This was about 10 years ago. Since then, I’ve jus played recreationally around town.
Until this year. I was talked into playing with a grandmasters team (you have to be over 40) and decided to play in my first tournament two weeks ago. That didn’t end well for me. We were playing in our second game of the day against a team that was made up of college kids. I go to make a cut from a stand still, feel a pop and fall flat on my face. I pretty much knew what happened (the wife had ruptured hers several years ago), but I still looked back hoping someone had come up behind me and clipped my heel or something, but no. The kid who was next to me said he heard the pop.
So I make it home and go to see the orthopedic specialist my wife had seen years before. This guy has the best name for a foot specialist, Dr. Funk. I’m hoping I have a rupture similar to what the wife had and no surgery will be required, but no, I had to one up her by completely tearing mine.
So I had surgery this past Thursday. I think the procedure is called an Arthrex Mid-Substance Bridge Repair or something like that. They basically pull the torn tendon back together using sutures and anchors. There are videos on youtube of the procedure and it’s pretty cool, though it was sort of disturbing watching it beforehand.
So now I’m sitting at home in one of those fancy boots, bored out of my skull. The pain has been pretty minimal so far. I did have a couple of hours the night of the surgery where I wanted to chop my foot off though. The anesthesiologist did some sort of nerve block where I couldn’t feel my leg at all from just below my knee. I figured this would wear off slowly and once I began to feel something I’d start with the pain meds. Well it faded much faster than I thought it would and it took the meds a few hours to really kick in, so that night pretty much sucked. Aside from that, there has been very little pain. I haven’t even taken any of the pain meds for the past couple of days, only taking a couple of Advil prior to sleeping to help with the irritation of wearing the boot.
I go back to the doc tomorrow to get the bandages off. I’ve been fantasizing about getting the boot off for the past couple of days and am excited to see what it all looks like. I’m hoping he’ll tell me that I can start to walk with the boot and I can take the boot off occasionally, but realize that may be a pipe dream.
Well, that’s all for now.
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